The Street Sweeper: A Character Analysis

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I would like to start by introducing myself, my name is Elliot Perlman and I am the author of the brilliant yet disturbing novel ‘The Street Sweeper’. I have created characters that show perfect examples of Positive Psychology; this is shown through personalities and friendships in a moderate amount of roles throughout the book. Positive Psychology is grounded in the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within them, and to enhance their experiences of love, work and play.

Audacious cancer patient Henryk Mandelbrot, a Holocaust survivor demonstrates the applicability of positive psychology. Fictional characters like Henyrk Mandelbrot represent the thousands

Mandelbrot gives him a menorah but also an account of his war years, entrusting both to Lamont and urging him to commit to memory every hallowing detail. “They lined us all up in the dirt and shot every third one” (P442), Mandelbrot recites. These experiences affect the characters behaviour and psyche tremendously by creating and giving him a different personality after the camps and the way he acts with Lamont is not the most usual relationship. His portrayals of life in the Jewish ghettoes and the shorter existence in the camps make for sober reading. At first, we might feel this is a recognizable domain, however, to render my scenes more "obscure" I have brought the readers down to more profound tunnels that are so instinctive that they are practically unbearable. I have attempted to master the first rule of recreating the Holocaust in art: never be afraid of excess. Indeed, any attempt to downplay the gracious leads to charges of inauthenticity, and in this way a desolation of obligation. I try to avoid this by having Mandelbrot tell Lamont that he was an individual from the Sonderkommando thus allotted with herding Jews into the gas chambers and afterward transferring the corpses to the crematoria. Mandelbrot doesn't hold back on subtle detail. Lamont and the reader have to learn so they don't